Modern French Literature

In the 1950s, while Annie Ernaux was still a teenager, the theater of the absurd was created, through which playwrights attempted to emulate their sentiment of the meaninglessness of life. This same concept was present in literature and was espoused through a philosophy called existentialism, of which writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were two strong proponents. There was also the birth of the so-called New Novel in which writers attempted to distance themselves from the traditional storytelling techniques and focus their writing on merely describing events as seen by their invented characters. Time sequences were not always chronological and settings were often surreal. Some of the better-known writers of the New Novel included Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Younger writers such as novelist Nathalie Sarraute searched for new ways to express themselves and did not bother to use identifiable characters or plots in their...